Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Staunton, February 10 – Kremlin-controlled
television channels have proved effective and extremely difficult for Western
media outlets to counter because they provide both entertainment and an imagery
that promotes the suspension of critical thinking and the acceptance of the
idea that the leader will solve everything, according to Peter Pomerantsev.

And
it is this very different task that the Kremlin has set for the media that
simultaneously makes it effective – it appeals to people’s emotions rather than
reason – and make it difficult to counter by those, such as Western news
outlets, who believe they can succeed by countering the falsehoods alone,
something that won’t work, the analyst says.

Propaganda
“played an important role in the Soviet Union,” Pomerantsev ponts out, and it
has been “very important for Vladimir Putin.”It has deep roots and was far more extensive than anyone in the West can
imagine and used less television than now but more circuses, youth groups and
the like.

Putin began to
focus on the way in which television could be used in 1996 when he “saw how
corrupted contemporary television transformed Boris Yeltsin and saved his
presidency” and then even more in1999 when “television created Putin” and
Putin, having become president, made it his first task to “take control over
it.”

The Kremlin’s
propaganda effort now is different from that of Soviet times, Pomerantsev says.
Not only is there less overt censorship, although it exists, but “now the
Kremlin is acting at a much deeper level” in ways that in some respects “recall
the principles of the establishment of a religious cult” rather than a news
operation.

What is striking,
he says, is that “Russian television offers an unbelievable number of
entertainment shows of the Western type. But the content of Western television
was “democracy plus films about James Bond and the Santa Barbara serials.” In
Russia, it was recognized that “it is possible to create entertainment
television … but without a democratic component.”

Entertainment brings in a larger audience,
but it also does something else: it promotes the notion that news is not important
but that emotional responses are.And to
that end, it talks about conspiracies and mystifications of various kinds to “distract
attention from real information and politics.”

“Just
as the founders of a cult constantly remind individuals of their negative
experiences, so too the political technologists of the Kremlin force Russians
to experience again their sense of denigration of the 1990s and of Stalin’s
time,” not rationally but in order to render Russia “a country of incurable
traumas.”

According
to Pomerantsev, this system came into being not as the result of the genius of
any one individual or group but as a result of the gradual recognition of the possibilities
that entertainment television could open for the ruling elite and especially
for the ways in which it promotes simultaneously anger and passivity.

Unlike
Hitler and the Nazis, the Russian leadership of today “does not want people to
go into the streets” or to demand that they be sent to Ukraine. Rather it wants
“passive aggression,” anger without action.

Unfortunately,
he continues, the West does “not even understand” that this is what is
occurring. It did not understand hybrid war, and it does not view Russian media
operations as “an active measure” in that war, something a KGB department would
supervise in order to spread these values among Russians and among “useful
idiots” abroad.

According to Pomerantsev, the West faces serious
obstacles in struggling against the Kremlin’s efforts. It first must recognize the
centrality of this new form of propaganda for Putin and then it must work to
counter specific lies and then to overcome the “aggressive passivity” that
Russian entertainment television “without democracy” is promoting.

Moreover,
he continues, because the Kremlin “uses information for masking disinformation,”
the West needs to create some institution that will keep track of that. During
the Cold War, there was “an enormous analytic department” at Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty.Unfortunately,
that has been closed, and nothing has been put in its place.